by Tony Black
Valentine reached out to steady her. ‘Here, sit yourself down . . .’
She folded her arms again, seemed to grip herself as if a saw blade was slicing through her middle. ‘I need a fag . . .’
‘Right, just wait.’ He went to the top of the stairs and called out to the squad in Leanne Dunn’s flat. DS McCormack came running, one hand in her bag removing a packet of cigarettes. Valentine caught the box of Benson & Hedges as she threw them and then nodded for her to join him on the stairs.
‘Here you go, love,’ he said.
Angela’s long, thin fingers, the nails bitten to the quick, shook as she opened the packet and took out the pink plastic lighter inside. She drew out a cigarette and pressed it in her mouth, and instantly the filter tip became smeared in thick lipstick. ‘I just saw her the other day . . .’
‘Had she been arguing with Danny?’
The girl looked up; her eyes didn’t seem to be able to focus. Valentine knew she would be needing a fix within an hour; her shoulders started to shiver as she spoke. ‘No. Danny was with me.’
The DI looked towards McCormack and then back at the girl. ‘Angela, I never asked you if Danny was with you.’
She flicked the cigarette ash on the stairwell, drew a deep drag from the tip. ‘But he was, all day . . . and night.’
DS McCormack was moving her head from left to right as Valentine looked up from the stairs. He placed the sole of his shoe on the step Angela was sitting on and leaned forward. Before speaking, he pinched the tip of his nose between thumb and forefinger and took a sharp breath. ‘Look, Angela, I want you to think very carefully about what you’re saying . . .’
She jerked her gaze towards him. ‘He was with me.’
‘Ange, I’m not buying that. It sounds too rehearsed to me.’
She returned her eyes front and brought the cigarette to her lips once more. ‘I’m not saying any more.’
Valentine stepped away. He straightened his back and motioned for DS McCormack to follow him to the foot of the stairs.
‘What do you make of that?’ he said in a whisper.
‘She’s lying.’
‘No kidding . . . Do you think Gillon’s put her up to it or is she acting on instinct?’
McCormack turned to look at the prostitute. ‘Hard to say.’
‘Right, get her down the station and let her sweat for a bit . . . She’ll be scratching at the walls for a fix soon enough. We can try her again then.’
‘Yes, boss.’
46
Valentine was loading Angela in the back of the car, his hand pressed on the crown of her head to guide her in, as his mobile started to ring. He closed the door but kept an eye on her; she looked so thin and frail that he wondered if the handcuffs might slip off her delicate wrists.
‘Yes, Valentine,’ he said.
‘Boss, we got him.’ It was DS McAlister.
The DI turned away from the car. DS McCormack was getting into the passenger seat; she halted with one foot on the tarmac.
‘Tell me you’re talking about Danny Gillon.’ He made a thumbs-up sign to McCormack.
‘Picked him up at the Auld Forte . . . Had the van parked outside, which was a bit of a giveaway.’
Valentine thought to allow himself a moment of elation, but it soon passed; the squad was still a long way from where they wanted to be. ‘Ally, what about the van?’
‘What do you mean?’
The detective shook his head. ‘The mud, Ally, was the van covered in mud from the field in Mossblown?’
There was a pause on the line. ‘I can’t see from here, boss . . . Do you want me to check it out?’
‘It should have been the bloody first thing you checked out.’ He reeled in his temper. ‘Look, just get back to the station and fill me in there . . . but if there’s mud on that van I want samples and I want it soil-matched with the tyre tracks at the Leanne Dunn site.’
McAlister’s voice dropped; his initial enthusiasm seemed to have been drained away. ‘Yes, boss . . . I’ll do that right away.’
Valentine hung up. As he pocketed his mobile phone, he caught sight of DS McCormack’s hungry gaze. He turned away from her and opened up the back door, the one through which a few minutes ago he had manoeuvred Angela. He raised his voice loud enough for everyone to hear: ‘Good news, Ange . . . We have Danny to keep you company down the station.’
Her red mouth drooped. She seemed ready to allow words to pass her lips, but then she closed them tight and dropped her head towards her hands, which were cuffed in her lap.
‘Nothing to say, Ange?’ said Valentine. ‘Well, I’m sure Danny will have plenty to say: that’s always been my experience of the man, wouldn’t you agree? Likes to try and talk his way out of trouble, Big Gillon, doesn’t he?’
Angela sucked in her cheeks. When she turned to face the DI, she looked ready to spit. ‘Leave me alone.’
‘Oh, come on, Angela, you know there’s no chance of that . . . It’s murder we’re talking about now, not just streetwalking.’ He leaned back and slammed the car door shut. As he walked around the front of the vehicle, he kept his gaze firmly fixed on the prostitute; she followed him with her eyes.
Valentine got in the car and yanked on his seatbelt, then started the engine. He looked in the rear-view mirror as he spoke again. ‘You better have a think about what you’re doing, Ange. If Danny Gillon’s going down for murder and you’re telling me lies, then you’ll be going with him. Think about that . . . and while you’re at it, spare a thought for your friend Leanne, because if anyone needed looking out for, it was her.’
He turned the wheel and pulled out of the car park. He could see Angela staring out the window towards the block of flats and the group of uniformed police officers gathering in the street below. He tried to interpret her expression, but her face was unreadable. The detective knew things could get messy now: he was looking at hours wasted in interview rooms stringing together the stories of accomplished liars. It was a way of life to the likes of Gillon and Ange: their first instinct was to suppress the truth, even if it was in their own interest to reveal it. There was a buzzer that sounded in their heads when talking to police and it told them to revert to form, to obfuscate and to hinder. What he had in his favour, though, was the fact that they were both as likely as each other to sell out their own mother if it would save their skin. Angela was protecting her pimp now, but what did that really translate to? It was a sort of short-term self-preservation rooted to the fact that Gillon supplied her with trade and trips. When the reality dawned that Gillon was not going to be in a position to do either any more, then she’d see sense. At least, he hoped she would, and he hoped she would have something to say about Leanne Dunn’s death.
Valentine followed a monochrome road beneath a blackening sky all the way back to the station. For no reason that he could pinpoint, the town of Ayr looked locked in an old movie, one that had been playing in his mind for as long as he could remember. The grim cast of characters made an almost motionless glissade through the wet and windy streets he knew so well. In the dying light they looked like shadows, or ghosts; they were phantom people trapped in a phantom reality that the detective had constructed for a town he took only an eschatological interest in. He couldn’t quite recall having a need to escape before, but it was there now, fixed in his mind like it had been riveted there. He couldn’t see how he had come to this point, or how the town had changed so quickly from a place people took holidays to a place where life was cheapened and degraded by a race into entropy. He’d once been amused by the recital of a local poet’s tribute to Robert Burns, a fanciful recounting of his return to the town of his birth in the current day. Valentine had been amused by the poet’s reaction to the one-way system and the out-of-town hypermarkets, but in retrospect those comments seemed nothing but the work of a churl – because if he came back now, Burns would be horrified; he’d gallop through the place faster than Tam o’ Shanter haunted by any ghaists and houlets.
&n
bsp; No words had passed between the occupants of the Vectra that was driven by Valentine, and when he parked it seemed almost an invasion of the enclosed space to open his mouth. He exited quickly and took two steps towards the back of the vehicle, where he motioned for Angela to get out. She slid herself along the back seat. She had the movements of a much older woman; her face was chalk white as she stood in the broad exposure of the car park.
‘Come with me, Angela.’ DS McCormack emerged from the car and beckoned the young woman towards the station.
Valentine nodded to the detective and mouthed, ‘Thank you.’
He stood with the door open, a blustery wind picking up behind him, and stared at the dark patch on the backseat that he knew had been made by his own blood. The sight seemed to jolt him and he couldn’t understand why; he had seen it so many times before that it shouldn’t even be a concern. But it was, and he felt gripped by its strange sight: the long-standing stain hadn’t changed shape or position, but somehow had more significance for the detective. As he stood, threaded to the image by his eyes, he had to shake himself out of a hypnotic trance. He slammed the door and walked towards the station, telling himself that to look back was to be lost. He needed to think about the future, about salvaging his career while he still could, and about securing the conviction of Leanne Dunn’s killer.
In the open-plan station, Valentine caught sight of DS McCormack standing with Angela; she’d separated the prostitute from the other detectives and uniforms who had Danny Gillon handcuffed where he stood at the main desk. He seemed cocky and obstreperous as the officers booked him in. Valentine raised his hand and signalled to DS McAlister to separate from the group and join him by the stairs.
McAlister turned away from DS Donnelly and made his way to the DI.
‘Hello, boss.’ He smiled and tipped his head towards the crowd he had just left. ‘Nice result, eh?’
Valentine held his face firm; his expression was immobile. ‘We don’t know that yet.’
‘Well, we got him anyway . . . That’s a start.’
‘How’s he been?’ said Valentine.
McAlister inflated his cheeks and exhaled slowly before answering. ‘Honestly?’
‘I wouldn’t want a lie.’
He looked away. ‘Well, he’s been playing the big innocent . . . and being really shirty with it.’
‘What do you mean?’
McAlister scratched the top of his head and returned his gaze to the DI. ‘When we clocked him in the pub he didn’t even move, never got off his stool . . . He thought we were there for someone else.’
‘He’s acting it, Ally.’
‘I don’t know, boss, he looked rattled when we took him out . . . Quite a contrast to how relaxed he looked when we spotted him. If he’s putting on an act then he’s bloody good at it.’
Valentine put his hands in his pockets. ‘I’ll be the judge of that when I get him in the interview room.’
‘You taking him down now, sir?’
He nodded. ‘In a minute. Let them get the pair of them sorted first.’
DS McAlister turned back towards the others. ‘OK, I’ll get on with it.’ As he went, he pointed a finger to the ceiling. ‘Oh, and his van was clean.’
‘How clean?’
‘Spotless.’
Valentine shook his head and headed for the stairs. ‘Aye, clean as one straight from the car wash, I’ll bet.’
As he ascended the stairs, he met the chief super on the mid-landing. She seemed confident, almost jaunty. He didn’t want to be the one to dispossess her of the notion since it was the first time in living memory he could recall seeing her this way.
‘Good work, Bob,’ she said. She was two steps past him and staring back up the stairs before she spoke again. ‘I really didn’t think you had it in you.’
If there was a reply queuing in his mind, it was some distance behind the other thoughts he had, ones like delivering her a lecture on the basics of policing and the finer points of employee etiquette. He resisted, however, because he had more important matters placing demands on his attention and any interaction would merely rob the CS of her misguided optimism.
In the incident room, Valentine rounded up the case notes and photographs he wanted for the interview with Danny Gillon. He had already decided the questions he wanted answers to and how he was going to get them. Gillon might have been playing the innocent with Ally and Phil, but it would be harder to maintain in the sight of colour reproductions of recently mutilated corpses and the plain threat of a life sentence. Whatever it was that Gillon knew – and he was concealing something, of that Valentine had no doubt – the detective wanted it.
Valentine hung his grey dog-tooth sports coat on the coat stand at the end of the room and headed out to the vending machine to collect a cup of coffee. As he waited for the slow vend to materialise, the gurgitating coffee released its familiar aroma; it was enough to insinuate the hint of caffeine into his senses. He collected the cup and sipped. A long draft followed and then he made his way towards the interview room. Outside, a uniformed PC stood with DSs McAlister and Donnelly. The PC held out a packet of Club and a box of Bluebell matches for the detective.
‘Thanks,’ said Valentine. ‘You pair set?’
They nodded, and McAlister spoke. ‘I’ll come in with you, sir.’
‘Right, then let’s get on with it . . . Phil, you and Sylvia get what you can out of Angela.’
‘Yes, sir.’
As Valentine turned the handle on the door, he saw Danny Gillon raise his head from the small wooden table and let out a tut.
‘I thought you were finished . . .’ said Gillon.
Valentine smirked, then slapped the folder down on the table. ‘You thought wrong, son.’
Gillon straightened his back and reclined in his chair; he eyed the cigarettes covetously.
‘So, what’s all this about?’ he said.
‘What’s it all about?’ said Valentine. ‘Are you taking the piss, Danny?’
The stocky pimp rolled his eyes towards the roof beams. ‘I told this one here that I don’t know what any of this is about.’
‘Aye, well . . . You might want to rethink that statement.’ Valentine opened the folder and removed a picture of James Urquhart’s corpse. He let the bloody and scarred flesh sit before him for a moment and then he removed another picture of the corpse of Duncan Knox and, finally, the picture of the corpse of Leanne Dunn.
Danny Gillon stared at the pictures; he seemed to have lost some of his assurance and several shades of his pallor. He opened and closed his mouth like a recently landed fish and then he pushed the pictures away.
‘Not pretty, is it, Danny?’ said Valentine.
Gillon was staring at the cigarettes; the detective picked up the pack and started to remove the cellophane wrapping. ‘Where were you last night, Danny?’
He looked away. ‘I was with Ange . . . You know that.’
Valentine started to laugh; McAlister joined him on a lower volume.
‘Aye, you can laugh, but she’ll back me up on that!’
‘Do you think I care if you have a junkie streetwalker standing alibi for you, Danny?’ said Valentine. ‘This is a triple murder investigation, not a counter jump at the BP garage.’
Gillon stood up and hit his palms off the table. ‘I don’t know fuck all about that!’
The detective opened the box of cigarettes and slowly extended a single filter tip from the packet. ‘Calm yourself down, Danny . . .’ he said. ‘Here, have a fag.’
Gillon snatched the packet and walked away from the table with the two officers. When he had lit up, he returned to his seated position and placed the cigarette box on the edge of the table.
‘Ange’s word’s as good as anyone’s,’ said the pimp.
‘Oh, aye . . . and how do you work that out?’ said DS McAlister.
‘It just is. I mean, it’s her word against yours.’
Valentine leaned forward. ‘She’s a drug-addled prost
itute and you are her pimp who has form for beating the living daylights out of her . . . What court are you putting this proposal to, Danny? A court of laughing gnomes wouldn’t take you seriously!’
Gillon drew on the cigarette and the detective pushed the photographs back towards him. ‘Think about it, Danny, think very carefully about what you’re saying to me. Look at those pictures: three lives have been taken and we have to account for them. Now, so far I’ve got your face with a bull’s eye on it pinned to my board and unless you convince me otherwise I’m sticking a dart in you.’
Gillon drew deeply on the cigarette. A grey trail of smoke escaped from the elongated ash tip as he spoke through his bottom row of teeth. ‘I told you, I was with Ange.’
Valentine reached out for the photographs, collected them up and shuffled them into position in the folder. As he closed the blue folder completely, he pushed out the back of his chair and rose. He didn’t look at Danny Gillon again. He turned to DS McAlister.
‘Can you believe this idiot?’ he said.
‘You just can’t help some people.’
‘He thinks he’s bulletproof, but he’s more like the Yorkshire Ripper using Rose West as an alibi.’
McAlister laughed out. ‘He’s going down for the lot, boss.’
‘Oh, I think so, Ally . . .’
The officers headed to the door and Valentine knocked twice. The PC opened up.
‘Let us out, we’re done with him.’
47
DI Bob Valentine stood outside the interview room and pressed his back to the wall. His shirt provided little insulation from the cold plaster and a shiver seemed to pass straight into his shoulder blades and down the thin sweat-line below. He widened the spread of his feet to add strength to his stance, but the detective didn’t feel in the least way steady or confident. He’d thought he had something on Danny Gillon – they all did, especially the chief super – but now he wasn’t so sure. Gillon didn’t have the intelligence to bluff and yet he was assuredly defensive in his answers. There was no reason for him to keep what he knew to himself in the circumstances unless it was because he was afraid of greater consequences or was protecting someone. Neither of those two options made any sense to Valentine; there was no greater consequence than life imprisonment for three murders, unless you counted death itself. And Danny Gillon didn’t regard anyone, save himself, as worth protecting; he wouldn’t put his own neck on the block for anyone. Bits and pieces of thoughts crossed Valentine’s mind like motes, but they were all indecipherable, fleeting particles of information. He needed to see the whole picture, not just isolated swatches whose details may or may not be of value when taken as part of the wider purview.
